Dr. Darrell Marshall has been awarded a $1.25 million Small Business Innovation Research Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation to advance Helios-1, the AI-powered device his Detroit company, Total Analysis, built to detect dangerous germs on surfaces in minutes instead of days. For a founder who started the company out of personal loss, the award is both a business milestone and a measure of how far the idea has traveled.
The Loss That Built the Company
In 2021, Marshall took his grandfather to a hospital for a head injury. An hour later his grandfather was on a ventilator, and a month later he died of a hospital-acquired infection. Marshall, a chemist with a doctorate in bioanalytical chemistry from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, started asking doctors and nurses how infections spread. The answer stunned him: some 90 percent of germs travel on surfaces. That same year he founded Total Analysis with chief operating officer Kristin Klaus and chief technology officer Fatema Bhinderwala.
The stakes are not evenly distributed. Marshall points to safety-net hospitals, the facilities that serve Black and brown communities, where as many as one in 15 patients may contract an infection during a stay. Helios-1 attacks that problem at the point of contact. The portable device reads the molecular fingerprint of bacteria, proteins, peptides, and DNA included, and matches it against a lab-built database using machine learning, delivering an on-site answer with no lab and no specialized training required.
What Phase II Makes Possible
The new federal award builds on an earlier NSF SBIR Phase I grant, part of nearly $400,000 Marshall raised in the company’s early stages. Phase II funding is designed to carry a proven concept toward commercial launch, with Helios-1 initially targeting healthcare and agriculture settings. Marshall’s longer horizon is bolder: wearable technology that makes checking for germs as routine as checking a heart rate on a smartwatch.
The story is also a generational wealth story. A Detroit native raised by a single mother who told him he could be a scientist, Marshall is building equity in a deep-tech company in his hometown, in a sector where Black founders remain rare. Federal research dollars, won competitively, are now compounding that bet.
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